Judgment Days

Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. “were unlikely partners, the master politician who became president and the eloquent minister who led a revolution,” Nick Kotz begins his superbly told story. “Yet they came to work together in a political pas de deux of immense complexity and fragility to produce the most dramatic social change since the Emancipation Proclamation.”

King and Johnson’s relationship began on the day of John F. Kennedy’s funeral, when Johnson reached out to King, whom the Kennedy administration had held at arm’s length. Their testy but productive collaboration reached a climax with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. King called it a “shining moment.”